A Taste of Ph.D for Bachelor Students
Find an interesting question and build the research design useful to come up with an answer. It is a preliminary work usually carried out by PhD students. In this case, the task was given to the students of the Bachelor in International Politics and Government (BIG) for the Policy Evaluation course. Divided into teams, they chose a research question and worked on projects they presented during the last lesson. "The aim is to let students familiarize with statistical tools which they use to evaluate aspects of politics and society", explains Paolo Pinotti, professor at the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management and responsible for the course. "Each group focused on current and very different topics: crime, car accidents, immigration, education, prostitution...".
"It was stimulating to have the possibility of freely choosing the question to work on", says Martina Zardinoni, a student who, with her group, focused on the possible correlation between the enhancing of late-night public transportation in Milan and the reduction in the number of car accidents. "This is a subject that we feel as very close to our reality, reason why it was even more stimulating to work on it," she continues. "We also thought it was important to include an analysis of the change in the number of accidents during the Expo period, when night public transportation was also active during the week".
Angelica Bozzi's group chose instead to study a way to analyze the possible impact of immigration on crime in Italy and on the role played by immigrant communities: "We believe it is reductive to analyze the phenomenon of immigration in absolute terms, we have therefore included in the research the collection of data on the displacement of immigrants in their communities in Italian cities and data on their nationality. All this with the ultimate aim of deconstructing stereotypes about the correlation between immigration and the increase in crime", she explains. "In carrying out this research project, we realized how difficult it is to research and find the data required to carry out a research project and how much time is needed to complete this kind of project".